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By the time I. Chow Down bellied up to his first salad bar, Jane and Michael Stern had covered tens of thousands of miles immersing themselves in the nation’s vernacular victuals.
When I interviewed Michael in 1978, not long after the first edition of “Roadfood,” he was uncharacteristically unopinionated about North Carolina’s No. 1 food issue: “It’s a little bit scary. We’re both dilettantes. In a discussion of eastern and western North Carolina barbecue, we couldn’t hold a candle.”
Mrs. Forde’s Coffee Shop in Laurinburg made the Sterns’ national top 10 list, perhaps as much for its memorable proprietor as for its 75-cent meals: “Mrs. (Norma) Forde is dressed for action. Her stockings are rolled down below the knee, and her apron is full of pencils and menus. Her manner is brusque. She scolds and cajoles her customers like a medieval maid in a bawdy dining hall.”
Mrs. Forde’s only complaint about her “Roadfood” mention? Those were socks, not stockings.

The Sterns’ appreciation of North Carolina cuisine didn’t extend to Calabash, where they had been steered by a “welcome lady” at an I-95 border station. They found the well-known seafood enclave “a phony Carolinaland (with) the most expensive food in the state, and the most grossly hawked….Muzak, blobby miniature golf courses, blaring papier mache dinosaurs and mechanized first mates beckoned us to enter various ‘captain’s tables,’ to ‘climb aboard the salad deck’ and to ‘walk the planked steak.’ “